In this paper, we propose a new spot-futures hedging method that determines the optimal hedge ratio by minimizing the riskiness of hedged portfolio returns, where the riskiness is measured by the index of Aumann and Serrano (2008). Unlike the risk measurements widely used in the literature, the riskiness index employed in our method satisfies monotonicity with respect to stochastic dominance. We also provide an empirical example to demonstrate how to estimate and test this optimal hedge ratio in equity data by the method-of-moments.

Sousa (2010a) shows that the residuals from the common trend among consumption, financial wealth, housing wealth and human capital, cday, can predict quarterly stock market returns better than cay from Lettau and Ludvigson (2001), which considers aggregate wealth instead. In this paper, we use a more appropriate proxy of human capital, which alleviates the potential correlation between the residuals and the regressors and makes the estimation more precise. In addition, we extend housing wealth to household capital by taking durable goods into consideration. The new predictor is proposed accordingly. Empirically, we find that our predictor is superior to the other alternatives.

There is a long-standing debate on whether sell-side analysts learn from their experience to improve earnings forecast skills. This study shows that incentive is an important factor for understanding the “learning by doing” effect by analysts. We examine analysts’ response to a complex type of information – corporate pension underfunding. Pension underfunding negatively impacts future earnings and analysts on average underreact to such information in their earnings forecasts. More importantly, when there is a strong incentive for analysts to deliver accurate forecasts, analyst learning effectively reduces their underreaction to pension underfunding information. On the other hand, when such an incentive is absent, the analyst learning effect is not discernible in the data. Further evidence suggests that analyst learning and incentive jointly reduce stock market mispricing associated with corporate pension underfunding.